Rethinking Immigration Reforms

"Immigation"

07/09/2008

Paul Munnis


Sooner or later we have to admit that we are not going to have enough workers in the U.S. to fill the jobs that we already have. When that happens we are going to have to get workers from someplace and we won’t be able to do much of that with a devalued U.S. Dollar.

We were treated to some of this as insight at the Wisconsin Dells wherein the traditional summer hires from European nations have chosen not to work in America this year because in the context of the Euro, our wage scales are too paltry for the European economy that they must return to. So, people from the Baltic States are coming instead and their work ethic is not considered too hot.

We will need to attract high tech workers from Asia and Europe. We already do that to a degree using the H1B worker status and the Student Educational Visa mechanisms.

We can probably fill many of the mid-range jobs ourselves. We won’t have enough low level entries for the Blue Collar workforce though and that means retail stores, landscaping companies, builders, food workers, factories, our military, food plants and others will be shy of workers. We have plenty of neighbors to the Southwest that yearn to work here but we are building a wall to keep them out. American wage scales are now on a par with Brazil’s and so workers can go there, get employment and do just as well as if they had come to the U.S.

So the Wisconsin Dells model is a likely model for the whole U.S. blue collar worker segment of our society and is a nationwide model too.

I know America is sharply divided over the matter of immigrant workers and I know that the major concern is with illegal workers. So some kind of a “guest worker program,” will be needed for the U.S. nevertheless.

Colin Nickerson, writing in the Boston Globe on April 19, 2006, provided a concise history of the German experience with guest workers:

“Germany needed workers. Turks needed work. So starting in 1961, the country invited Turkish ''guest workers" to come do the dirty jobs that Germans didn't want.

Only 7,000 ''gastarbeiter," as they were called, arrived that first year, a curiosity in a country where non-European faces were rare. Press flashbulbs popped. Politicians made speeches of welcome. Ordinary Germans watched, bemused.

Nobody grasped that the country -- and the continent, because neighboring nations soon undertook similar experiments -- was on the brink of a transformation whose effects are still reverberating across Europe.

In Berlin, which today ranks as the largest ''Turkish" city outside Turkey, falafel stands and kebab joints far outnumber eateries offering schnitzel. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, Islamic calls to prayer are as common as church chimes. In the raw-knuckled housing projects ringing Paris, graffiti are more likely to be scrawled in Arabic than in the language of Voltaire.

''The idea, originally, was that the foreign workers would stay for as long as economically necessary, then go home," said Michael Bommes, director of the Institute for Migration Research at Germany's Osnabrueck University. ''It didn't quite go like that."

As the US Congress wrestles with comprehensive immigration reform, one idea under discussion is a new program that would allow guest workers to enter the country, but not necessarily to stay on and become citizens.

In Germany, guest workers -- mostly poorly educated young men who were issued special visas allowing them entry for one or two years to take unskilled jobs -- helped the nation to become the third-richest in the world. The fabulous post-war prosperity of France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and other West European countries was also boosted by immigrant labor, mainly from
Turkey and North Africa.

But more recently, as economic growth has slowed, swelling numbers of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa -- many of them arriving without any visas, or overstaying their visas and melting into the ethnic suburbs -- are being blamed for social stresses from urban blight to chaotic schools.

In the words of the late Swiss writer Max Frisch: ''We wanted workers, we got people."

Guest workers, unlike ordinary immigrants, were admitted under special jobs programs, and at least under the original plans, had no prospects of becoming citizens or permanent residents. Germany, like other European countries, at first refused even to allow them to bring families, hoping to discourage them from trying to put down roots. Later, Germany granted work stays of up to five years, and permitted wives and children to come along.

For decades, there were no efforts to integrate the newcomers. They were entitled to social benefits, but not citizenship. Their children could attend schools, but little effort was made to give them language skills. Far from a melting pot, Europe in the post-World War II era became the realm of ''parallel societies," in which native and immigrant populations occupied the same countries but shared little common ground.

Now, the presence of millions of largely unassimilated newcomers, coupled with terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, has triggered furious debates in Europe over national identity and the future of immigration.

France, in an about-face, has decided it no longer wants to admit the poorest of the poor, just skilled workers who speak fluent French and respect the ideals of secular democracy. Germany and the Netherlands have passed new laws that seem intended to thwart immigration from Islamic lands -- with potential newcomers queried about attitudes toward women's rights, Jews, and gays.

The only unskilled guest workers still recruited in large numbers are the migrant harvesters who perform the mostly seasonal stoop labor disdained even by the jobless in more affluent countries, including Germany and Britain.

But, in a major shift, even migrant workers these days are mostly recruited from within Europe -- tens of thousands of Poles, for instance, harvest Germany's famous white asparagus; pickers from Lithuania and Latvia pluck strawberries and other crops in Great Britain. Europe's guest worker programs were mostly scrapped during the recessions of the 1970s, but in a pattern reflecting the Hispanic flow into the United States, the movement of Muslims to Europe only accelerated. Those early guest workers routinely overstayed their one- or two-year permits, or lived from extension to extension, but faced scant risk of deportation unless they committed serious crimes.

Many of the first generation of workers bought houses or established small businesses, although usually confining themselves to immigrant enclaves. Their German-born children were registered as ''foreigners." They often spend years or even decades resolving their legal status.

While many European governments failed to seriously pursue integration, many Muslim immigrants were equally unwilling to shed their own languages and national identities.”

There are a couple of notions for Americans here: one is that like the Turks, there are large numbers of Iraqi intelligentsia now in refugee camps across the middle-east. Bush has only permitted a trickle of them as immigrants but in fact many of them would be welcome additions to the shrinking American workforce. Just as America managed to absorb Vietnamese and Somalian immigrants we can bring in qualified people seeking to live in America and we can learn from Germany’s experience on how best to do this.

We also need to think much more seriously about Mexico and Guatemala. If we don’t find a way to create some equality of opportunity for those folks we could find a revolution happening on our southern border and if that happens then illegal immigrants will pour across our borders as refugees. It would be far better for us that we develop a proper method of admitting a quota of these people and under a controlled guest worker program.

However if we don’t fix the strength of our dollar why this is going to be a moot point for few will want to come to a nation whose pay scale is so low.